Oscar Hijuelos - Thoughts Without Cigarettes

The newspaper of record certainly reflected that: As someone who can remember coming to The New York Times , which I used to deliver as a kid, only later while in college (when it seemed a distinctive step up in terms of syntax and vocabulary from the papers I had been raised with), the fact that I never saw any reviews of Latinoauthored books in its pages seemed to be a sad comment on how little publishing had changed since my first novel had come out. What Hispanic- or Latino-surnamed authors they did review, or that bookstores and publishing houses cared about, came out of the “Boom”—García Marquez on the top of a heap that, however wonderful, left little room in the public imagination for those writers, like an Edwin Vega, who, coming up the hard way, with nary a connection in the outer world, remained unknown to New York publishing and therefore to a mainstream audience in America.

My agent must have seen in me the potential for bridging that gap. I think a lot of it had to do with the way I looked: She was Jewish, and because I had been sometimes taken as so, I am sure she considered me more “sellable.” In such circumstances, my nondarkish /non-ethnic looks probably struck her as an asset, and the truth is that, whenever I met up with such editors, like a Harvey Ginzburg or a Cork Smith, the barely visible hesitation on the part of someone trying to reconcile my face with my name ultimately became an expression of relief. And that alone must have put them at ease. (Well, perhaps that all just happened in my head. At least on one occasion, I learned that the fact that I was Latino could be offputting. When my first novel came out, I gave a copy to my next-door neighbors, some five elderly Jewish sisters, who had, at first, been delighted, only to later knock on my door and return it, one of them saying, “Oh, but we thought you were Jewish. I’m sorry, but this is not for us.”) Nevertheless, even after the minor success of my first “immigrant” novel, a genre which, as I would learn, seemed to have very little to do with “real” literature, I still couldn’t muster much faith in myself as a writer nor, for that matter, in my novel about those cubano brothers who go on the Lucy show. Instead, I found myself longing to write something truly “literary.” (Translation: having nothing to do with my Cuban roots.) At a certain point, I decided that it was time for me to “shit or get off the pot,” as my older brother, with his fondness for blunt sayings, would put it. Either I would write a book or forget about the whole thing — maybe go back into advertising or follow that other nascent dream, of becoming a high school English teacher.

In any event, having put in a successful application for a residency at the MacDowell Colony some months before, I spent six weeks or so that autumn, in 1987, holed up in a cabin in the New Hampshire woods, working with all the sincerity I could muster on a “literary” novel. Under the influence of just about any writer I read or heard — poets swarming through that place and giving nearly nightly readings of some kind — my prose took on a delicacy and fineness of language that I had never thought possible. The story, some two hundred pages’ worth of it, tapped into some of the longings I must have felt as a kid in the hospital. In that novella, a group of terminally ill children (somehow) realize their situation and, though dying from unspecified causes, (somehow) manage to organize an escape from their home and into the woods, where they (somehow), as I recall, hook up with a magical entity, a witch who lives in a cottage, who restores them to health, but only briefly. (I remember hitting a wall and wondering how to get the hell around it.) I must have been thinking about Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the story “Hansel and Gretel” at the same time, but however I had constructed that story, I deliberately went out of my way to avoid mentioning my Cuban-ness, while aspiring to a style that was lyrical, erudite, and, so I thought, beautiful.

Coming back with what I considered a masterpiece, the kind that would establish me as more than a promising “immigrant” voice, I finally decided to show it to Ms. Wasserman. She read the manuscript quickly, over a weekend, and called me up so that we might have a lunch to discuss it.

“That novella,” she later told me in some Lexington Avenue restaurant, “is about the worst and most pretentious thing I have ever read in my life.” Then, shaking her head, she said, “Look, just put it aside. Take my word for it.”

This may sound strange, given the previous buildup, but, though I had written the thing, it had not come from my heart (though I carried an eternal image of terminally ill children inside me) and the whole process had been torturous. While one part of my psyche, benumbed from an overexposure to too much lyrical poetry, had been persuaded that it was good, no matter what anybody might say, another side of me, the one whose skin had started to break out again into dry raw patches, suspected that it was a piece of treacle. Come what may, I felt a tremendous sense of relief at her appraisal. There was something else: I liked the fact that she could be so bluntly honest with me, which is to say that in those moments, I felt as if I could trust her, at least when it came my writing.

“So what else have you been working on?” she asked me.

A curious-looking woman, very plump and short, her visage a cross between that of Gertrude Stein and Queen Victoria in her later years, and with a florid style of dressing that, depending upon flowing scarves and ankle-hem dresses, harkened back to the fashions of the 1920s, she, in fact, conformed to what one might have fantasized a slightly eccentric agent to look like. Indeed, in the coming years (over almost two decades), I’d learn just how eccentric an agent like her could be, but at the time, I felt nothing but pure gratitude that someone who represented the likes of Saul Bellow could have taken so much interest in someone hardly known to anyone except back in my old neighborhood, and then only as the “guy who wrote that fuckin’ book.” Above all, however, it was her expertise that I needed.

“Didn’t you once tell me you had something else in the works?”

“Well, that other thing?” I said. “It’s about these musicians from Havana.” And I went on to fill her in on some aspects of my story, such as they were. She couldn’t have been happier to hear about it: Two Cuban brothers who end up as walk-on characters on the Lucy show? She loved the notion.

“But get me some of those pages as soon as possible,” she insisted. “And I’ll read them over and see what I can do.” Then, as I looked off, as I sometimes did in moments of discomfort, she tugged at my sleeve. “I mean it,” she told me. “Don’t forget.”

Living alone in those days, I could do whatever I pleased in my apartment: smoke, drink, and eat at any hour, get up at three in the morning if an idea hit me, go out when I felt like it, watch Bozo the clown on TV if I wanted to, jam with musician friends, put out cigarettes in the wall, turn on a bed light in the middle of the night to read, and, among so many other things, I could work at my own pace and never worry about having to clean up what someone else might call a mess. Not having outgrown the shopping-bag method of writing left over from Our House , once I had to actually come up with some pages from my book, which was then still entitled The Secrets of a Poor Man’s Life , I emptied several boxes of that manuscript out onto my living room floor, and, in the only aesthetic clue (aside from paying close attention to false sentiment and good language) I’d taken from Barthelme, a collagist at heart, I proceeded to arrange and rearrange them into various piles, aiming to achieve, as Cortázar had done in Hopscotch , a novel whose chapters and narratives, such as they were, flowed into one another as atmospheres, not so much in any order but through the associative power of what the characters’ emotions conveyed; or, if you like, almost musically, which was exactly the effect I’d wanted, though I’d never really thought of it as so until I actually laid it out. Without realizing it, I already had much of the novel’s supporting structure — its framework — including a number of short experimental sections that were written in the voice of a young boy, my stand-in, as it were, and who, for the sake of a potential narrator with an inside, highly subjective view of the story, happened to be Nestor Castillo’s son, Eugenio: I liked one particular bit in which he describes watching the I Love Lucy show with his uncle Cesar, a superintendent and former Mambo King, and that made for the opening. I followed that up with what I believed to be a pretty sound portraiture of Cubans in New York in the 1950s, the ins and outs, literally, of Cesar Castillo’s sex life, as well as the inner torments of his brother — perpetually pining away for a woman he’d left behind in Cuba, María. Somehow, so many little bits I’d written, with so casual a freedom — and therefore happily brimming with tons of life — fit together so perfectly that, at a certain moment, I suddenly understood how jazz musicians feel when, thanks to some clever arranging, all their crazy-shit riffing falls into place, to make something that you’ve never heard before.